Research from BigCommerce has found that Americans are about evenly split on online versus offline shopping, with 51% of Americans preferring e-commerce and 49% preferring physical stores. However, 67% of millennials prefer shopping online over offline. According to Forbes, 40% of millennials are also already using voice assistants to make purchases, with that number expected to surpass 50% by 2020.
Another way to analyze popularity is to tie it in with where customers are going when they leave a certain ecommerce platform. The reason this is interesting is that it gives you an indicator of which of the companies have kept up with technologies and made improvements to bring in additional customers. A quick market share search on Shopify shows that the Shopify company is gaining most of its customers from Bigcommerce, Big Cartel, and Volusion. Bigcommerce is still stealing some customers from Shopify, but it used to be the number one place that people would go after Shopify. We assume it's because of the Bigcommerce pricing.
Now that you have a promising product idea and a clear overview of the market, it’s time to start thinking about the key elements of your store, such as your brand name, domain name, brand guidelines, and your logo. Getting your brand right from the start can help accelerate the growth and conquer the hearts of potential customers. Before turning your attention to building the store, you should spend some time studying the basics of SEO, so that your business gets off to a good start.
First of all, let’s keep in mind that WooCommerce is eCommerce software, while Shopify and Bigcommerce are eCommerce services that don’t require any installation per se. To get started with WooCommerce, you first need to find a good host, install WordPress on your account, and only then you can proceed to the WooCommerce part of the deal. Luckily, these days all good web hosts offer one-click installs for WordPress. (For that, we recommend WooCommerce hosting with SiteGround.)
Webgility is a premium Ecommerce Operations and Accounting automation software designed for multi-channel ecommerce companies who use QuickBooks or Netsuite. Run your whole ecommerce business from a single app — Automate your accounting and sync your business data—including inventory, order management, and shipping—to your QuickBooks or Netsuite. All within one comprehensive app. Automate your accounting—and ditch the busywork — Easily and automatically post all of your sales directly into QuickBooks or Netsuite, knowing it’s timely, accurate, organized, and tax compliant. Create sales receipts or invoices, record expenses and fees, and fully reconcile—error-free. Manage orders—and improve customer satisfaction — Process orders faster. Easily search, sort, filter, import, and export multichannel orders. Manage cancellations and process and track returns and refunds. Automatically create purchase orders for out-of-stock items. Ship faster for less – Automatically connect orders to shipping carriers (FedEx, UPS, USPS) for instant rate comparison. Simply click to print shipping labels and pick lists, validate addresses, track shipments, and notify customers. Never oversell with accurate multichannel inventory — Instantly sync and update price and quantity between all sales channels and QuickBooks or Netsuite. Keep track of what products you have listed on what sales channel, what’s selling for what price, and when you need to order more. Gain valuable insights with powerful analytics — Learn actionable intelligence based on data insights to run your business with strategy instead of guesswork. See all channels, expenses, inventory, financial, and customer analytics to optimize operations and increase revenue.
Live Music Archive is essentially a partnership between Internet Archive and etree.org, a community dedicated to providing high-quality, lossless versions of live concerts. You can think of it as a bootlegger’s paradise given the site’s sheer abundance of concert material, much of which focuses on jam bands such as the Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, and Sound Tribe Sector 9. Still, there are a host of other bands to choose from — The Smashing Pumpkins, Jack Johnson, Animal Collective, etc. — along with plenty of genres to browse, ranging from jazz to reggae.
Live Music Archive is essentially a partnership between Internet Archive and etree.org, a community dedicated to providing high-quality, lossless versions of live concerts. You can think of it as a bootlegger’s paradise given the site’s sheer abundance of concert material, much of which focuses on jam bands such as the Grateful Dead, String Cheese Incident, and Sound Tribe Sector 9. Still, there are a host of other bands to choose from — The Smashing Pumpkins, Jack Johnson, Animal Collective, etc. — along with plenty of genres to browse, ranging from jazz to reggae.
Modern Omnichannel Retail Software for Branded Manufacturers and Retailers. Allow your teams to work smarter, stay agile, and drive connectivity. Stay ahead of consumer expectations, adapt to changing market conditions, and bring together your marketing, operations, and fulfillment systems to deliver truly personalized customer experiences across all channels with Kibo’s omnichannel retail solutions. Kibo eCommerce is the only leading solution developed in the smartphone and tablet era, with a mobile ready architecture that automatically creates higher converting responsive or adaptive sites from your main site theme. Kibo eCommerce software empowers your digital marketing teams to work smarter by quickly creating promotions, landing pages, and marketing content optimized for organic search and paid search conversion—all from a single user interface. Our drag and drop enterprise retail website builder and theming engine makes it easy to create unique brand experiences. Kibo's Real-Time Individualization solution helps you deliver engaging, consistent experiences across every touchpoint. Finally go beyond segmentation by revolutionizing the way your brand connects with consumers. Kibo RTI software takes personalization to new heights through intelligent on-site search and merchandising. Enable your teams to create and optimize personalized content across every buying touchpoint from websites and emails to mobile apps and in-store interfaces, without burdening your IT resources. Kibo Order Management software bridges the online and in-store divide by connecting inventory with your customers in real-time. Kibo's Distributed Order Management System evolves at the speed of your business allowing you to provide seamless customer experiences with an order fulfillment system that enables flexible, convenient, and cost-efficient delivery. Equip in-store and call center associates with inventory information across your network and customer data to make relevant recommendations. Simplify the challenge of in-store customer experience management by leveraging the Kibo Mobile Point of Commerce (mPOC) solution to provide save-the-sale and endless aisle capabilities.
Akshay is a passionate marketer and enjoys providing innovative and valuable insights to the blog. He is currently the Founder of a Global Content & Growth Marketing Agency, and loves to help startups, agencies and marketing managers grow their business. Interests that excite him include innovation, startups, health & fitness, meaningful experiences, golf & meditation.
Digital River's MyCommerce offering is a cloud SaaS ecommerce solution that provides complete payments, subscriptions and recurring billing, with full-feature merchandising and a great checkout experience for your shoppers. Built for global, but designed for self-service and simplicity, MyCommerce empowers clients to grow their digital business with enterprise capabilities and developer agility. Digital River has a full suite of ecommerce solutions to meet your business needs and take the complexity out of global ecommerce. We remove the risk and challenges of running a global ecommerce operation: legal and regulatory compliance, language and localization, local payment methods and multiple currencies, banking relationships, fraud protection, tax collection and filing, and financial reconciliation. This low-cost, risk-free option offers flexibility, speed-to-market and instantly global presence to grow your online business. Sign-up for free at www.MyCommerce.com/sign-up.
Starting at $29.99 per month, BigCommerce is abundant with features. A Standard pricing plan comes BigCommerce comes with a number of sales channels, and is rich in features, including a responsive website, single-page checkout, Apple Pay, reporting tools, HTTPS, and more. While it lacks powerful content management capabilities, you can easily integrate BigCommerce with a CMS like WordPress to reap the benefits of content and commerce.
But, the devil is in the details. At the end of the day, Shopify seems like a more laser-focused solution. Everything that Shopify offers is geared at making your online store more functional and easy to use. With WooCommerce, the platform is extremely feature-rich and it doesn't lack any specific eCommerce features. However, it's still an add-on to WordPress, making it more complex to configure.
SuiteCommerce enables B2B and B2C merchants to rapidly create unique, personalized, and compelling branded shopping experiences across multiple channels. Differentiate your brand and exceed customer expectations, whether it is through mobile, online, or in-person, and empower your sales associates to provide engaging customer acquisition and retention experiences by utilizing a single source of item, inventory, customer and order data to feed your customer-facing systems. SuiteCommerce's integrated cloud-based nature unifies business applications and provides a central repository for order management and customer details, item and inventory data, creates seamless, omni-channel, brand experiences, and streamlines your business for continuous growth.
We are in talks with a few organizations who have very substantial interest and whose values align with ours. As negotiations continue, I may write more updates here as we move along and may be able to announce a new parent org for FMA in the coming weeks. Nothing is set in stone though so we still face shutdown, and if you have questions or want to help, please contact us using the Closure Comment form (at the end of this blog post).
Not every song posted on SoundCloud is free, but both big-name and lesser-known artists often offer free downloads if you can manage to find their verified profile. You can browse SoundCloud by artist, genre, popularity, or latest postings; you will be surprised at how many free tracks are out there. There is also a section of the site dedicated to tracks released under Creative Commons licenses, which means you’re free to download, remix, or tweak them as much as you like.
The DoJ has revealed an unsealed indictment of eight defendants for crimes related to their involvement in widespread digital advertising fraud. The DoJ alleges the eight individuals were behind two global schemes, 3ve and Methbot, which stole tens of millions of dollars through a scam that used fake Web traffic and fake websites to reap ad view revenue from unwitting advertisers. [More...]

In addition, e-commerce has a more sophisticated level of impact on supply chains: Firstly, the performance gap will be eliminated since companies can identify gaps between different levels of supply chains by electronic means of solutions; Secondly, as a result of e-commerce emergence, new capabilities such implementing ERP systems, like SAP ERP, Xero, or Megaventory, have helped companies to manage operations with customers and suppliers. Yet these new capabilities are still not fully exploited. Thirdly, technology companies would keep investing on new e-commerce software solutions as they are expecting investment return. Fourthly, e-commerce would help to solve many aspects of issues that companies may feel difficult to cope with, such as political barriers or cross-country changes. Finally, e-commerce provides companies a more efficient and effective way to collaborate with each other within the supply chain.[69]

The new WordPress 5.0 release is the start of an exciting process which will eventually make large parts of your #WooCommerce admin interface easier-to-use and more dynamic – allowing you to better customize and manage posts and products.https://woocommerce.com/posts/woocommerce-and-wordpress-5-0/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=WooCommerce&utm_content=WordPress%205.0%3A%20What%20the%20new%20Block%20Editor%20means%20for%20WooCommerce …

Shopify may come second when we look at the overall volume of SEO features available, but there's certainly no shame in the way that it presents content. It also handles basic SEO practices like meta information and site copy with ease. So long as your business is producing quality content, there's no reason to suggest you won't enjoy great results and strong user engagement.

E-commerce helps create new job opportunities due to information related services, software app and digital products. It also causes job losses. The areas with the greatest predicted job-loss are retail, postal, and travel agencies. The development of e-commerce will create jobs that require highly skilled workers to manage large amounts of information, customer demands, and production processes. In contrast, people with poor technical skills cannot enjoy the wages welfare. On the other hand, because e-commerce requires sufficient stocks that could be delivered to customers in time, the warehouse becomes an important element. Warehouse needs more staff to manage, supervise and organize, thus the condition of warehouse environment will be concerned by employees.[18]
With more choices of products, the information of products for customers to select and meet their needs become crucial. In order to address the mass customization principle to the company, the use of recommender system is suggested. This system helps recommend the proper products to the customers and helps customers make the decision during the purchasing process. The recommender system could be operated through the top sellers on the website, the demographics of customers or the consumers' buying behavior. However, there are 3 main ways of recommendations: recommending products to customers directly, providing detailed products' information and showing other buyers' opinions or critiques. It is benefit for consumer experience without physical shopping. In general, recommender system is used to contact customers online and assist finding the right products they want effectively and directly.[74]
Thanks, most of all, to you - our amazing community! From the volunteers who helped us maintain the site and bring new artists on board, to the curators and bands whose contributions diversified our collections, to our funders, to the folks that used the site everyday and made it the legendary corner of the web that it truly was. It was an amazing nine years, and we are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished together.

3dcart has no transaction fees, which is always a big plus. It also offers both a mobile front-end and a mobile back-end. What’s interesting is that it also has a full suite of web store related services, like SEO or Facebook marketing. That’s not common for a shopping cart provider but could come in handy. I would advise you to look at some other pages on the site as well, since there are some excellent resources there (like a shopping search engine comparison).

CUSTOMER SERVICE – Additionally, with a commercial solution you benefit from the support structure. Open source solutions such as WordPress are often community driven and you are therefore dependent on that community to provide support. While that can also work very well – if you are in desperate need of help at 3 am on a Sunday, it’s nice to have a guarantee it will be there.
To start an online business it is best to find a niche product that consumers have difficulty finding in malls or department stores. Also take shipping into consideration. Pets.com found out the hard way: dog food is expensive to ship FedEx! Then you need an ecommerce enabled website. This can either be a new site developed from scratch, or an existing site to which you can add ecommerce shopping cart capabilities.
Imagine an ecommerce platform that allows customer service reps to have a single view of a customer across all channels, a centralized order and inventory management system that can efficiently fulfill orders from all your sales channels, including brick and mortar stores, or utilize a customer's order history data to provide personalized and relevant offers. The possibilities brought to light with the advent of a complete ecommerce platform for business optimization and improved efficiencies as well as deepened customer engagement and satisfaction are limited only by one's creativity.

WooCommerce 3.5.2 is now available. This release patches a number of bugs, adds compatibility with the Twenty Nineteen theme and with PHP 7.3, and fixes one security issue. Versions 3.5.1 and earlier are affected by a stored XSS vulnerability through the API which can be exploited by users with write-access API keys, and we recommend all users running WooCommerce 3.x upgrade to 3.5.2 to mitigate it. Thanks to Karim for disclosing this vulnerability.

Catalog management — displays products by category in a way that’s easier to navigate than scrolling or searching through lists of hundreds or thousands of products. Most basic e-commerce tools do not provide this type of functionality because it is not critical for small companies. Medium and large businesses that sell a high number of products and services can significantly benefit from using catalog management software by creating custom catalogs for various consumer segments, and sometimes even for individual B2B customers.
Ecommerce can be a very rewarding venture, but you cannot make money overnight. It is important to do a lot of research, ask questions, work hard and make on business decisions on facts learned from researching ecommerce. Don't rely on "gut" feelings. We hope our online ecommerce tutorial has helped your business make a better decision in choosing an online shopping cart for your ecommerce store.

A Canadian-based ecommerce solution, Shopify has been helping online businesses across the globe with a sharp focus on the trending social commerce and mobile shopping. Founded in 2004, Shopify has always kept up with the pace of evolving ecommerce trends and technologies, having broken ground on powerful additions such as social shopping whereby your customers never leave their social media platform in order to buy from you.

The contemporary e-commerce trend recommends companies to shift the traditional business model where focus on "standardized products, homogeneous market and long product life cycle" to the new business model where focus on "varied and customized products". E-commerce requires the company to have the ability to satisfy multiple needs of different customers and provide them with wider range of products.

1ShoppingCart is the world’s most popular automated solution for businesses who want seamless integration of all the tools needed to be successful online. Add a Shopping Cart and Lead Capture to your website in minutes. Then use the built in marketing tools like Automated Email Marketing Campaigns, Affiliate Program Management to follow up with your customers and make more sales.

Important: If you will be using the Twenty Nineteen theme included with WordPress 5.0 or if you will be using PHP 7.3, you should also be using WooCommerce 3.5.2+. In this release we’ve added the necessary styling for stores to look nice in the Twenty Nineteen theme and made backwards-compatible code tweaks to prevent notices and warnings when running PHP 7.3.
Unilog is a global technology company that delivers powerful, affordable eCommerce solutions for the B2B marketplace. Our cloud-based eCommerce platform and product data enrichment services help distributors, manufacturers, and wholesalers increase online sales, reduce cost to serve, and enhance their digital channel. Unilog is an ISO 9001:2008- and ISO 8000-certified company with North American headquarters outside of Philadelphia, PA and international headquarters in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit www.unilogcorp.com.
Shopify may come second when we look at the overall volume of SEO features available, but there's certainly no shame in the way that it presents content. It also handles basic SEO practices like meta information and site copy with ease. So long as your business is producing quality content, there's no reason to suggest you won't enjoy great results and strong user engagement.
Magento is established as the global market leader for online retailers, commanding a whopping 20% of the total eCommerce marketplace, and it now supports over 250,000 businesses with its platform – in comparison, the closest rival has just 11% market share. Aside from leading the pack, it’s fully customisable appearance and functionality make it ideal for almost any business. With regular updates and a huge support community, Magento is head and shoulders above any other eCommerce platform in our opinion.
Getting an online store launched on Magento from scratch is even more problematic than on WooCommerce. First off, there are two versions of Magento: the first one is the free community version (which is software that you can download and then install on a server – kind of like WordPress+WooCommerce), the second one is a hosted service (one that you can just sign up to – kind of like Shopify).
According to our reports from readers, this spikes your rates up to around $900 to $1,500 per month. It's still unclear how this will affect those businesses who plan on remaining in the lower tiered pricing plans, but one thing is certain: Customers that surpass certain revenue points are not happy with Bigcommerce. We would put them on the bottom of our list if your company will end up with one of the most expensive plans.
WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. And it's available for free. Packed full of features, perfectly integrated into your self-hosted WordPress website. Add powerful shop facilities to your WordPress website with our free eCommerce plugin. Powering over 24% of all online shops, WooCommerce helps you sell anything. Beautifully.

Weebly’s range of price plans and various features make it great value for money. You can easily scale up through the price plans as your store grows, but for large or fast-growing stores, it’s not the best option. Weebly is developing its ecommerce focus and releasing some promising updates. With Square now opening up Weebly’s ecommerce abilities, we definitely recommend watching this space.

Catalog management — displays products by category in a way that’s easier to navigate than scrolling or searching through lists of hundreds or thousands of products. Most basic e-commerce tools do not provide this type of functionality because it is not critical for small companies. Medium and large businesses that sell a high number of products and services can significantly benefit from using catalog management software by creating custom catalogs for various consumer segments, and sometimes even for individual B2B customers.
Oracle Commerce is the industry's top-ranked commerce solution that powers the world's best brands, and delivers a consistent, personalized cross-channel customer experience. Oracle Commerce offers a complete commerce software platform that enables you to deliver a personalized customer buying experience across all customer touchpoints, including the web, contact center, mobile devices, social media, physical stores, and more.
Let’s start with a fact. When it comes to e-commerce plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce is definitely the world’s most popular. There’s no doubt about it, since it powers about 30% of all online stores out there. That’s huge! And if you wonder where all this success comes from, we’ll let Tuts+ instructor Rachel McCollin answer for us in her course A Beginner’s Guide to Using WooCommerce:
Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web for at least one part of the transaction's life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of online books (such as Amazon) and music purchases (music download in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store), and to a less extent, customized/personalized online liquor store inventory services.[1] There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electric markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supported by electronic business.[2]

Before you can sell it, people must want to buy it. Our e-commerce platform lets you analyze site traffic and browse-to-buy conversion rates to define special offers and new products based on customer behavior. Create personalized shopping experiences with targeted content and offers, and increase satisfaction through ongoing engagement—before, after, and at the point of sale.

This means your store won’t just look good with Squarespace: it’ll pack a punch too! But if you want speedy growth on a large scale, you might find Squarespace too small too soon. With no app store, you’re totally reliant on the inhouse features and tools provided by Squarespace. Shipping and payment options are also limited when compared to Shopify and BigCommerce.
How do they really know? That's the question that immediately comes to mind in reviewing the top-level data from Voxpro's recent survey of customers and their relationship with chatbots. The data show that 68 percent of consumers haven't used chatbots to contact a brand. About 1,000 people answered the survey. How reliable is that number, though? I'm not disrespecting Voxpro -- just the opposite. [More...]

Bigcommerce also has a nice library of themes for you, divided into multiple categories, and all of them responsive and fully customizable. They were developed to establish a more modern, fluid user experience, utilizing cool new merchandising features for categorization and differently sized catalogs. There are both free and paid options available, and I have to say that those free ones really are attractive-looking.